It’s one of those announcements that reads like a trailer for an argument—tight, specific, and clearly meant for a certain kind of reader.
April 23 brings a public dialogue in New York City, in collaboration with Ocula Magazine, where the discussion turns to Trauma Culture and Film at New Directions, a Gallery in Chelsea.
Tickets are available on Luma.
Trauma Culture meets the gallery room
On the page, there’s also a kind of manifesto-in-miniature about the university itself, and it’s not subtle.
The writer says they’re working on a longer piece about why “everyone on the Left and Right hates the university,” sketching two poles: one calling for abolition or decolonization, the other wanting to starve it into something like an HR department for anxious white-collar workers.
That doesn’t sound like event-copy, but it does explain the tone: the seminar isn’t being packaged as neutral education, more like a refusal to treat institutions as the final gate.
A small sensory detail lands in the middle of all that, almost accidentally: in the middle of the program notes, the mention of Caravaggio’s The Cardsharps (1594) sits like a visual cue—something about games, judgment, and the choreography of persuasion.
Not an explanation, exactly.
Just the kind of stray image that makes you pause, because it feels like more than decoration.
A May seminar for subscribers—and for the curious
The path described so far is familiar to anyone who’s spent time around critical theory circles—The Authoritarian Personality (1950), then Freud, then Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment.
But the notes add texture by admitting where the work is currently going: there was a digression into Gangster Capitalism; now, the writer says they’re “writing the book,” with ideas about exploitation and coercion getting more complex.
There’s also the admission that keeping up with ongoing research gets harder as the thinking deepens—something many scholars would recognize, honestly.
The book “will owe a good deal” to the CLiuAnon Gangster Capitalism seminars, so it’s not a clean separation between public teaching and private writing.
And then, almost like a dare, May is promised to be devoted to “one of my favorite essays by the gnomic master of the form.” If you’ve ever tried to read Benjamin seriously, you already know what that means: you don’t just consume the text, you get pulled into its strange weather.
The notes don’t completely explain what’s coming next, and that’s probably intentional.
There’s also a line about “very exciting news” involving the Palm Springs School for Social Research—“watch this space!”—which suggests the seminar calendar is more than a schedule.
It’s a living project.
One more note sits under the whole thing, and it’s a personal aside: the writer says they considered submitting a longer piece to major publications, but won’t hand over what they call the key to CLiuAnon world.
In the end, the argument is that “we make up in intensity what they have in prestige.” That’s the spirit the May session seems designed to carry—Less polish, more insistence.
And somewhere between the gallery talk and the Benjamin thesis reading, you get the sense of a community trying to keep thinking even when the institutions around it feel hostile.
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